Sami

A few tips: - In the building scenes where you can view item descriptions, if you hold your mouse over the items, you can see even more information. If you do that with reactors, it will show you what type of generators they pair with. Item descriptions usually explain this too. That will tell you the combinations as clear as anyone else can. - The power required for a specific ship to warp seems to be affected by different variables like the weight of the ship, and the type and scale (size) of the warp drive used. That means reducing vessel mass, increasing warp drive size, and using a larger warp drive can all potentially reduce the power needed. - The power required for warp is also affected by where the ship is: more specifically, the gravitational force of the cosmic body the player is affected by. It's also affected by the speed desired for warp. The slowest speeds require the most power - but if you don't need to go the slowest speeeds, then you don't need that extra power. - All of these variables combine to make it difficult to recommend a single set up because it depends on what you're using the warp drive for, what kind of ship, etc. - Generally speaking, only a few reactors are able to supply the power necessary for warp at all speeds, and they're the ones that use antimatter/positrons and generate power at the Gigawatt-scale. Two reactors are my favorites for warp designs: the SAGE engine, and the beam core antimatter reactor. - Heat Radiation is a critical aspect of all this and also illustrates varied use cases: the best radiators are the graphene blanket ones, but they can't be retracted which means atmospheric landings will destroy your capability to warp (because the radiators will be torn off). Static radiators like the Graphene Skin Wrapper can work for atmospheric use cases, but you'll need a whole lot more of them. Toggle-able panels like the graphene folding ones are somewhere in the middle (but require you to manage them and remember to reploy/undeploy!). - Tech upgrades can unlock huge performance improvements to warp-related technology. Researching those technologies will make a far wider range of designs possible. Improvements to power generator efficiency, to warp drive power requirements, to radiator performance, AM/Positron storage - they're all interrelated and all important. I personally try to unlock everything first before trying to design warp ships because the difference can be so big. - Finally, testing your designs can be fairly quick. You can test warp charging on the ground at a launchpad just to make sure it even works, and to test warping, you only need to get to space (not into orbit). If possible, you generally want a ship that can skip orbiting burns and just charge/warp straight from that first burn to space (it's quick and efficient). Some design tips for those reactors: - The SAGE is actually a reactor and an engine in one and it's quite compact as well. It works well with smaller ships and particularly well for atmospheric use cases (SSTOs) because it can fuel its thrusters entirely with atmosphere, meaning it uses no fuel beyond what the reactor requires (positrons). That atmospheric engine is typically extremely powerful too (very high thrust to weight ratios). The reactor can be paired with a Thermal Power Generator to also generate the electricity required for warp. The reactor uses positron fuel at a decent rate so two things worth noting about the positron fuel containers is that a) they can store far more once the relevant technologies are unlocked and b) they're fragile in high temperatures so need to be protected in some way (farings, payload bays, etc). The downside of a SAGE is using the engine in space doesn't give the greatest ISPs. Pairing it with more efficient engines is possible. Larger spaceplanes can combine the one central SAGE with two flanking Rocinante engines, for example, and go basically anywhere with lots of Delta V. - The Beam Core Antimatter reactor is also a good choice because it can generate insane amounts of power (up to the terrawatts) - enough to power basically any ship configuration you have, even very heavy ones, but it can also be scaled down to 0.625 if required while still generating hundreds of gigawatts. Pair this reactor with a thermal power generator to power your warp drive. The amount of radiators required to extract even a fraction of what it's generating is significant (there's a KSPIE tool in the building scene that you can use as a rough guide). If you have a design that's not quite generating the power you need, adding more radiators often helps. My biggest issue with BCA reactors is that if I enter time warp with the reactor active, even if I'm not drawing much power, the ship seems to periodically eat a chunk of antimatter - About 20x what I use for a charge+warp. So either bring a whole lot of antimatter so you don't have to worry about this, or have a secondary reactor/generator (Molten Salt/Thermal Power Generator, for example) you can switch over to when not warping. Hope that helps and that you enjoy the mod! I came here to thank the creator for it, haha. I had a blast with it and learned a lot about RL tech